Cardiovascular disease involves diseases or disorders associated with the cardiovascular system. Such disease and disorders include those of the pericardium, heart valves, myocardium, blood vessels, and veins.
Over the last two decades, the morbidity and mortality of heart failure has markedly increased (Tavazzi, 1998). Therefore, finding an effective therapeutic method is one of the greatest challenges in public health for this century. Although there are several alternative ways for treatment of heart failure, such as coronary artery bypass grafting and whole-heart transplantation, myocardial fibrosis and organ shortage, along with strict eligibility criteria, mandate the search for new approaches to treat the disease. Cell transplantation has also emerged to be able to increase the number of contractile myocytes in damaged hearts. However, cardiomyocytes, which are also known as cardiac muscle cells, are terminally differentiated cells and are unable to divide and their use in cell transplantation is limited by the inability to obtains sufficient quantities of cardiomyocytes for the repair of large areas of infarct myocardium.
Thus, one strategy would be induce gene expression or express proteins in the heart, e.g., in cardiomyocytes after injury to protect the cells from cell death, or as preventative strategies such as introducing agents or genes into cells to increase their resistance to mechanical and/or hypoxia induced stress. Traditional methods for introducing agents or inducing gene expression has been from exogenous DNA, or from recombinant viral vectors, however, the use of such gene therapy methods have potential risks of introducing unintended mutagenic genome changes as well as being potentially toxic to cells and/or elicits an innate immune response. Additionally, protein replacement therapy may also be difficult due to issues with the in vivo delivery of proteins inducing innate immune responses as well as problems with protein stability and/or delivery to particular tissue and cell types. Accordingly, there exists a need for efficient method for in vivo gene expression and/or protein expression for beneficial research and/or therapeutic applications.